This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application.
Wi-Fi is a local area wireless technology for wireless local area network (WLAN) product based on institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standards. Developments in the 802.11n and 802.11ac standards have extended Wi-Fi to allow wider bandwidths for signal transmission include 40/80/160 MHz modes that employ a form of channel bonding to increase data rates. In doing so, the Wi-Fi device can only target a single receiver at a time, i.e. it is a single user orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission.
These increased channel widths have been less effective when the data being transmitted consists of smaller packets or when the number of users is large. The reality is that the repeated contention for channel access to transmit multiple small packets to different users presents a large overhead in current Wi-Fi deployments. This is a scenario that the 802.11ax standard wishes to tackle.